Version 1.7.9 is out: Largest update yet

I’ve just published the largest update yet to MarketGoogle Play, and it should be ready for download in a short while. This update is called version 1.7.9.

Version 1.7.9 has been completely re-designed so it looks and peforms great on both tablets and phones. The previous version wasn’t really designed for phones, and I’ve really made up for that with this release. It’s significantly better. It also takes advantage of many of the latest features of Android, and there’s even more to come in the future. It’s impossible to go through all the changes in great detail, so I’ve just mentioned a few of them below. You’ll find a complete change log after the break. I’m going to update various parts of this website to reflect the changes in the latest version, so please be patient.

It’s intelligent!The new version of Mizuu is much better at identifying your files and recognizing naming conventions. It also supports scraping by folder name for both movies and TV shows, and it even supports the {tvshow_name}/{season}/{episode} convention. A few examples of this would be: “Chuck/Season 4/S04E02.mkv” and “Chuck/S04/02.mkv”.

Say goodbye to dialogsWell, kind of. The number of dialogs in Mizuu has been significantly decreased. This means that you’ll now be able to use the entire screen when browsing cover art images, fanart images, actors and whatnot. This is especially useful on phones with limited screen estate.

Updated widgetsThe widgets have been completely re-designed as well, and both of them are limitless now. In other words, they’ll display all your content in a scrollable container. Also, the widgets now update every time you update your library, re-identify a movie/show or even when you download a new cover art image.

Library updates in the backgroundWhen you update your library in Mizuu, you’ll no longer have to wait for the process to finish, if you want to do something else. All library updates now happen in the background and you’ll get a notification that shows you the progress of the library updates.

No network support yetI know I’ve said multiple times that network capabilities were coming in the next version, and by that I’ve always meant version 1.8. And it’s definitely coming in version 1.8. But as explained in this post, I am fairly new to network capabilities from a code perspective, and I am therefore uncertain of how long it’ll take to fully implement. If anybody wants to help out, feel free to let me know. Many users won’t need network support and a lot of people just want to see what else is new.

This release includes a lot of other changes and I’m sure that every single one of you will be very pleased with the changes. I think every single one of them is for the better.

As always, please do report any potential bugs. It’s a massive update and although I’ve had a group of helpful beta testers, it’s very likely that we’ve missed a few things. The update for the free version will come soon.

Change log (version 1.7.9)*:

Actor view has been improved

Added “Movies in library” feature for Actor details

Added “Up” buttons in all parts of the application

Added a review dialog that appears after 30 application launches – it’ll only be shown once and you’re free to dismiss it 🙂

Added fade-in animation to backdrop images from the web

Added icons to application settings

Added new sorting options

Added option to search for trailers on YouTube in Trailers section

Added seasons browser in TV shows

Added setting to disable cover art and fanart browsers on touch

Added setting to disable subfolder searching

Added setting to enable Instant movie mode

Added setting to enable titles in overviews

Added setting to request root access – you’ll need to enable this if you’re currently using root access with Mizuu

Added support for additional external memory paths in File sources

Added support for custom backdrop images for movies

Added support for poster.jpg / poster.tbn files

Backdrop images now scale much better

Bug fix: Issue with movies and show titles including special characters (might need to re-scan or manually update) – update: not fixed for backdrop images, patch coming…

Bug fix: Localized movie data

Bug fix: Movie parts

Bug fix: Rare crash when removing a file source

Changed the way the horizontal scroll view works in order to fix a compatibility issue with previous version

Code optimizations and speed improvements

Complete rewrite of the file naming “decrypters” – more intelligent and more naming conventions are supported, including folder name scraping

I unfortunately can’t help with coding, but I know the App “x-plore” that does a great job at communicating with my NAS. Never seen anything move files on it so fast. Maybe they wouldn’t mind helping since your app is not competing with theirs.

Great update as always. Sad that you didn’t have time to finish network streaming. It is really a feature I would love to have since I stream most things from my server. This app would be like Boxee but better =)
Thank you for all your hard work

First: thanks for your great looking app! I just downloaded it an hour ago on my new Archos G9 tablet and I think this might just be what I am looking for next to XBMC on my computer. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to access my movies/tv-shows through my NAS devices but but browsing to \network\smb and from there to my NAS devices works perfectly. What I can’t seem to find is a way to store the Mizuu data-directory to my miniSD external card and/or an external USB stick ?! I have an only 8GB tablet and android ICS is already a bit shaky for maybe memory reasons on this device.
Anyhow, love it so far!

Hey Howard! Thanks for your nice comments. There’s no way to change the directory of the data folder, and there are two main reasons for that:

1. Android doesn’t allow developers to differentiate between internal and external memory. The only thing you can do is to request the default memory path, and – depending on the device – that can be both external and internal memory. Even if a device has both internal and external memory, you won’t be able to make Android tell you the location of the external memory. In Mizuu I’ve got a list of different paths to the external memory on various devices, which means I’ll have to go through the list at runtime to check if each path actually exists – if it does, there’s a good chance, that I’ve found the path of the external memory. But nothing is certain.
2. In cases where a device has both internal and external memory, it’s not possible for applications to write to the external memory on Android 3.2+ without a special permission. The Android developer team has commented on this, and have yet to figure out if it’s a bug or not, but I won’t do anything related to this until it’s cleared up. If a device has external memory only, this will be treated as the default memory, and as such will be writable despite it being an external memory source.

This is generally more complicated than it should be, but I hope my explanation helped a bit. Besides, I can almost assure you that Mizuu won’t take up that much storage space (see this), and that your performance issues with ICS aren’t caused by low storage memory. If anything, it’s low RAM.